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How Does Steinbeck Create Sympathy For The Oakies In The Grapes Of Wrath

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Compassion for the Oakies In the year 1930, the dust bowl hit many families hard in the Midwest, causing them to lose everything and pack up what is left to find work out West, leaving their friends, family, and farms behind in the dust. This is the harsh reality the Joads family had to face in the novel, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck. In the novel, the Joads head out west in search of work only to encounter death, misfortune, and hateful people along the way. Throughout the novel, Steinbeck creates sympathy for the Joads and other migrants in the novel using intercalary chapters and Christianity symbolism, in order to evoke change in the audience. The intercalary chapters and Christian symbols in the novel help set the mood and express …show more content…

One of the clearest examples of Christian symbolism in the novel is Jim Casy being followed by the whole Joad family. In the bible Jesus leads his twelve disciples to the promise land; at the time these twelve disciples were the only people who believed he was the son of god. Steinbeck uses this symbolism in the novel when the whole Joad family follows former preacher Jim Casy to California, which is their promised land. Jim Casy’s twelve disciples “Got into the cab, and then the rest swarmed up on top of the load, Connie and the Rose of Sharon, Pa and Uncle John, Ruthie and Winifred, Tom and [Ma]” (Steinbeck 113), along with Tom’s Grandparents, Al, and Noah. The Joads believed that the former preacher could get them to California safely, just like how the twelve disciples believed in Jesus. In addition, both the twelve disciples and the Joad family never gave up on what they believed in. The Joad family strongly believed they would make it in California and would be safe from anything happening again like this: “The families moved westward, and the technique of building the worlds improved so that the people could be safe in their worlds, and the form was so fixed that a family acting in the rules knew it was safe in the rules.” (Steinbeck 195). Like matter, Jesus’s disciples never lost their belief in him being the sun of God. The use of Christian symbolism in the novel helped garner sympathy for the migrant workers because sympathy exists in these events in the bible. Every Christian feels compassion for when Jesus leads his disciples to spread the word of God in the toughest conditions. By Steinbeck alluding to this event, he creates the same sympathy felt for Jesus in the Bible. The Joads and Jim Casy went under the same conditions as Jesus and his disciples and kept their faith through thick and thin. As can be seen, by alluding the Joads and Jim Casey to Jesus

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